The sexes are not in competition.
Well, 'cause if they were, eventually there wouldn't be any people left...
But seriously, unless you're planning to be an ascetic or survivalist (and even then it's questionable), collaboration and social-emotional intelligence are vital in every form of employment, whether STEM or otherwise. Even if one achieves a certain level of career success or functionality without them, the experience will be far less satisfying, and likely also less successful even on metrics with less emotional loading, since effective collaboration allows one to leverage not only one's own strengths and skillsets, but also those of others.
I would agree that part of changing the trajectory of females (and other under-represented populations) into STEM fields is re-defining what good engineers and scientists look like not only literally, but in terms of their critical skills. We've historically tended to call some of these "soft skills", but other names for them might be collaborative, team-building, management, resource development and integration, rhetorical (in the classical sense of presenting a convincing argument), leadership, etc.
